The Ultimate Quest: Holy Grail And Hero Tropes

The tales have been told since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory. Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden in the vast unknown shadows of the world. Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic, of gods and kings, of myths and monsters. From dark forests to the lands of ice, from desert wastes to the storm's thrashed seas, every corner of the earth has its legends to tell. Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter, of the wilderness and the dangers within. Stories of battles, of love, of order, and of chaos. But what are the roots of these fantastic tales and why have they endured so long? In this series we'll explore the history behind these legends and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them. War and disease, religious and social upheavals, the untamable ferocity of the natural world, and above all the monsters lurking within ourselves. Ivan was alone in the castle. His wife, the fair and fierce princess, had gone to war with her armies. She had left Ivan just one instruction. He was not to climb the tallest turret of the tallest tower. Weeks passed and Ivan grew bored. He remembered his wife's command but his curiosity conquered all. Ivan climbed the tallest turret of the tallest tower. At the top he found a chamber and within a starving prisoner. Please, water. Ivan was moved by the sight and fetched a cup of water. The prisoner drank it all but then he suddenly transformed. For the prisoner was none other than the dreaded Koschei the Deathless. You fool, he cried. Now you will never see your wife again. With that he bounded through the open window and swept like a whirlwind into the sky and soon he would have the princess in his grasp. He was ever to rescue his beloved wife, a long and dangerous adventure lay ahead. Ivan's quest had begun. The story of Ivan and Koschei the Deathless is an old Slavic tale but all human beings are storytellers. Throughout history and across civilizations humans have told one another stories. Stories of good and evil, of great deeds and lost causes, stories of our past, our futures and who we are now. Stories are a way we explore what it means to be human. We live today in a culture saturated with narrative and story but in the days before mass media, the internet, film camera, even the printing press, the need for story was no less. When the ability to read and write was given to very few tales were spread by word of mouth. With each telling a detail here might change or something there might be forgotten and replaced with something new and in this process of mutation these stories became something else. Something not stemming from one mind or one pen but something instead that was the product of a collective of particular people at a particular place and time. They became myth. Myths tell us who we are. We use stories to explain to ourselves why we do things in certain ways. They tell us about the part of ourselves that's emotion, that's not entirely rational. Things can happen in myths on a much grander scale. Emotions are heightened, drama is heightened. Myths tell us an awful lot about our desire for justice, the desire for truth, the desire for different sorts of virtues and about how and why we go on journeys and what we actually do on the journey in order to return home. It tells us what our values are. It tells us how we treat strangers, how we treat our family, how we worship the gods, what happens if we don't. They are embedded in our cultural psyche whether we realize it or not. Few myths are more exciting than tales of great heroes and the foes they encounter in their adventures. Such heroic quests are found entailed from cultures across the globe and throughout history. But there are often striking similarities between such stories. The mighty warrior is all but invulnerable to harm. The witches and wizards who help or hinder. The menacing giants, the beguiling temptations, the journeys into dark caves or into the depths of the underworld. All are found in tales from different cultures and different times. But what if there was more to these echoes than mere coincidence? That was the belief of an American mythologist named Joseph Campbell. From an early age Campbell was obsessed with mythology. As a young man in the 1930s he spent years examining ancient texts from around the world. It was in this period of intense study that a theory formed in his mind. It was a theory that would make him famous. In the countless stories that he read and analyzed Campbell thought he spotted something. A pattern. Campbell was trying to make a claim for a sort of universal human nature that can be appealed to by a certain kind of story. He laid out what he thought was the story that's common to all hero myths everywhere in the world. Campbell believed that you could read this kind of mythological quest or the hero's journey throughout all of western mythology. As he engages with non-western cultures he develops this idea further until we get the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Hero with a Thousand Faces was published in 1949. Drawing on the pioneering works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others, Campbell outlined the recurring stages he had identified in story after story from culture after culture. He dubbed it The Hero's Journey. The Hero with a Thousand Faces became an unlikely bestseller with a particular impact on the big screen. George Lucas the creator of Star Wars has credited the book with shaping his thoughts about the saga and Luke's thrilling adventures follow almost every stage laid out by The Hero's Journey. All Hero's Journeys begin with the hero at rest in their home culture. So one particular stage is the call to adventure. An outsider figure comes and calls them to adventure, says come on Luke you've got to go do something now and help this girl. He embarks on a journey into the unknown, a run that's usually much more crowded with the supernatural. The hero is tested in these strange surroundings and has to pass various trials in order to continue. Within that realm he meets various mentors and also various companion figures who become part of a sort of entourage that he travels around with. Typically he then has a near-death experience type adventure where he plunges down into some kind of abyss. But the hero survives this darkest moment and then achieves perhaps new knowledge or a treasure as a reward and then he flees pursued by the enemy. From which he arises transformed capable of fulfilling the quest on which he started out. There's one final test and that is often a moment of life or death. The hero has to use all the knowledge that he's gained up until this far to come through that and succeed. The end result is a new world, a new status quo that comes into being. The Hero with a Thousand Faces became one of the most influential books in the 20th century. But how did Campbell's ideas apply away from the cinema screen? Does Ivan's battle with Koschei the Deathless fit the model? What about the other great adventures of mythology? Is every hero truly on the same journey or is Joseph Campbell's theory just another myth? We begin with Arthur, legendary King of the Britons and the tale of the greatest quest his knights embarked upon. The quest for the Holy Grail. Stories of King Arthur have been told and retold for centuries. The legendary monarch was raised in obscurity far from court but he proved his birthright by drawing the sword from the stone and from his castle at Camelot he went on to rule Britain with wisdom and justice. King Arthur for us is a mythical figure possibly based on a real life figure from the 6th or 8th century. The very earliest reference to Arthur is in a 7th century Welsh poem. It's quite a fun one where a great warrior is described and then it adds sort of ruefully but he wasn't Arthur. It's that he seems just to be known as a warrior, he's not really being referenced as a king. But in the 11th century a guy called Geoffrey of Monmouth, obviously also from Wales, produces the first really sustained narrative about Arthur and the round table. The history of the Kings of Britain is a pseudo-historical account of British history chronicling the lives of its kings over the course of 2,000 years until the Anglo-Saxons assumed control of much of the island around the 7th century. The problem with the history of Britain is that it's not completely factual. It's a real patchwork of various historical facts, certainly some fiction mixed in, so it's a real melting pot of influences that Geoffrey Monmouth puts into the history of Britain. The author of mythology and the wonderful Towers of Camelot stand very much I think for a vision of Britain that never existed but perhaps one that a lot of people wish did exist. It has all the hallmarks of the great epic, boy born in obscurity, magical figures, battles, it has knights, it has romance, it has tragedy as well of course and then it has this notion at the end that the king will return. That I think is comforting on some level that in England's greatest need this epic warrior will return. So whatever you think a perfect king is, that's Arthur. What he's become is a British personification of the ideal king and therefore that varies across different periods because people's idea of what they want from a king and what they want from a leader is historically quite variable. Arthur was a great king but even great kings sometimes need help. So too would Ivan in his quest to defeat Koschei the Deathless. Ivan journeyed on through forests and valleys until one day he came upon a wondrous palace hidden among the trees. As he neared its gates he was watched from the branch of a lofty oak tree for this was the home of the falcon wizard. Ivan explained his quest to him. The wizard knew of Koschei and the danger Ivan faced. He promised help if ever it was needed. Ivan continued on his quest. In the days that followed he met an eagle wizard, then a raven wizard too. Both made the same promise to Ivan. He would need all their help to succeed in his quest and rescue the lost princess. Heroes cannot do it all alone. Sometimes they will have to rely on the wisdom and aid of others to triumph and sometimes these helpers are in disguise. Sometimes they possess magical powers and sometimes they go on to become as famous as the heroes themselves. At King Arthur's side through many of the stories is a mysterious figure with magical powers. The wizard known as Merlin. He was the one who planted the sword in the stone and it was he who brought Arthur from obscurity to claim the British crown. In popular culture today Merlin is as renowned as Arthur himself. He is the archetypal wizard, the ancestor and inspiration for Gandalf in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars films. But magical helpers such as Merlin are found throughout myth and legend. Joseph Campbell recognized this. The supernatural aid is usually an older character. Their wisdom and guidance are needed for the adventure ahead. Often too they must give the hero the final push necessary to leave the ordinary behind and enter the special world. King Arthur and the wizard Merlin were once thought real historical figures. Over time such beliefs faded. However the stories themselves never went away. The development of the legend in the medieval era culminated in 1485. That year saw the publication of Le Mort d'Arthur, The Death of Arthur. Eight stories of the king and his knights compiled from sources in France and in England. Here was the Arthurian legend complete. The author of the book was a man named Sir Thomas Mallory. Historical documentation tells us Thomas Mallory was a thief, a brigand, perhaps even a sexual predator and a rapist and ultimately he was incarcerated in Newgate prison in London. We tend to associate the Mort d'Arthur with chivalry and with a particular interest in the knights of the round table as defenders of women. So at first we might go well wait why would a rapist write that? It's this criminal aspect which has made critics wary of suggesting that this is the Mallory who writes Mort d'Arthur because they see a clear disconnection between his criminal behaviour and a text that seems to be about chivalry. The Arthurian legends may have roots in more ancient folklore but Mallory's work is distinctly Christian. Religious symbolism saturates the text and supernatural elements common in earlier versions are all but eliminated. In Mallory's Christian Camelot there is little room for the wizard Merlin and the pagan magic he represents. Even Arthur himself seems tainted by the association for the holiest and most famous adventure of Le Mort d'Arthur centres neither on Instead it is the knights of Camelot who embark on this great adventure, the quest for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail in most mythologies is the cup Jesus Christ used at the Last Supper in which he consecrated the wine and turned it into his blood. Later in legend Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have come along with this same cup and caught the blood from the wound in Christ's side. That cup then will give immortality to those who then drink from it of course immortality not just in the physical sense but much more in the spiritual sense. It becomes this holy relic with this really heightened significance where it becomes something to be possessed at all costs but something which only a few people can actually approach. The knights were called to adventure in the most direct way. During a dinner at Camelot the castle shook and a holy light filled the chamber. Then the Grail itself appeared before Arthur and his knights. After the miraculous appearance of the Grail at Camelot the knights Lancelot, Galahad, Percival and Bors sat out to retrieve it. Arthur mourned their departure. He knew the quest his knights embarked upon would change them forever and that the fellowship with Camelot would never be the same. His knights left the ordinary world of the castle behind. Crossing the threshold they entered the special world of adventure. Ivan had found his captive wife at last but the demon holding her was too fast. Dry as he might Ivan could never catch them. Koschei the Deathless had a magical steed whose legs outpaced the wind. The exhausted Ivan finally gave up the chase. It was then that Koschei attacked. Ivan was no match for the strength of the giant. Koschei chopped him into pieces, bound him in a barrel and pitched him into the sea. Far away Ivan's wizard friends sensed his plight. They rescued the barrel and put Ivan back together again. He could never outpace Koschei they said. Not without a magical horse and those could only be found beyond thrice nine lands and a river of fire at the home of the Baba Yaga. His quest was far from over but at last he knew how he could save his beloved wife and defeat the demonic giant. For a hero like Ivan to succeed he must overcome a series of often dangerous tests. Joseph Campbell called this stage the road of trials. Here these perilous for an audience exciting encounters challenge the hero who is often aided by magical helpers or thwarted by new enemies. But with every victory and setback our hero is learning and preparing for greater tests to come. No road of trials was longer or more arduous than that faced by the hero of the ancient Greek epic the Odyssey. Attributed to an author known only by the name Homer it tells the story of the journey home of Odysseus after the Trojan War. He had been fighting at Troy with his fellow Greek kings for 10 years. Meanwhile on his home island of Ithaca the son he had left behind was growing up without him. Other men were eyeing his empty throne and Penelope his unaccompanied wife. Odysseus was the king of Ithaca and he was known as being a very important hero during the Trojan War. He was the person who came up with the plot to get inside the walls of Troy with the Trojan horse and was mainly known for his intellectual skill. Odysseus is best described by Homer's opening line on him the man of many minds. The man with the really rich inventive brain. Odysseus was at war for a decade. Getting home however would take just as long. Such an extended journey was not Odysseus intention of course. He had planned to sail straight back home across the sea to join his wife and son in Ithaca. But as was often the case in the tales of ancient Greece, the plans of mortal men were at the mercy of unpredictable and often vengeful gods. The Greeks have managed to alienate some very powerful deities by their incessant pursuit of Troy and as a result of that they've particularly angered the god Poseidon and the god Poseidon pretty much ensures that Odysseus and his men aren't going to have a straightforward journey back to Ithaca. One of the people he met on his journey was the Cyclops Polyphemus. This is where the trouble starts. He and his men are captured by the Cyclops who's a big scary giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead. He starts eating Odysseus's men one by one and eventually lets them go by mistake because Odysseus tricks him. But then it turns out that the Cyclops is the son of Poseidon. Poseidon essentially is very offended at the outrage that's been done to his son and dogs Odysseus's steps all the way home. Odysseus's journey became a lot more difficult. On his road of trials he encountered hideous monsters, ravenous cannibals, a deceitful witch, together with all the wild and strange furies of the sea. Among them of course the beguiling but deadly sirens. These mysterious creatures lived in a meadow on a tiny island. Singing out to the ships that passed they lured countless men to their shores never to leave again. Odysseus knew all this but wanted to hear their song all the same. He ordered his men to stop up their ears with wax and tie him to the mast. No matter how he pleaded the men were not to release him and they were not to stop rowing. Homer doesn't tell us what the sirens look like. There's no physical description in Homer at all until you hit some point in the medieval period where suddenly you start getting many more illustrations of sirens as half woman half fish. When we think about how it is to live a life that's dominated by the ocean and by voyaging and by the physical apprehension of just how alien the ocean is we want to put some flesh on that to tell a story about that. To tell a story about our fear and our longing and to do that we create something that's part ocean and part us and that's the mermaid. Mermaids date back to the Assyrian cultures of 1000 BC but are common to folklore around the world. They are usually depicted as young and beautiful however much like the sea itself mermaids can help or hinder. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen is a story of the kinder sort. Published in 1836 the book tells of a young mermaid who saves a human prince from drowning. Falling in love she trades her beautiful voice to a sea witch for a potion which transforms her into a human. But winning the prince's heart proves far from easy. Andersen's kind heroine is unlike many other mermaids however. In British folklore the creatures brought bad luck and were said to taunt sailors in doomed ships. Slavic mermaids were also dangerous. They were called resulcas and were the spirits of the unhappy dead. Beautiful and damned they lured young men into the waters to drown beside them. Worth remembering at this point that hardly anyone could swim in the pre-industrial world. Therefore all cultures produce this phenomenon of terrifying emanations that represent death at sea. People tend to imagine sailors loving the sea. Actually they don't and all the folklore shows they don't. They distrust it and they find it terrifying and unpredictable and scary. This is way before we've got electronic navigation. This is in the early days of ship faring where you have to stay close to the shore because if you get too far out you're in trouble. It's well worth remembering how horribly physically impossible long voyages were in the past. So if you're at sea for more than three or four weeks scurvy would have started to set in and scurvy affects your mental processes. It makes you hallucinate, makes you see things that aren't there, makes you interpret what you see in frightening hallucinogenic type terms. Could these hallucinations be the cause of such visions of sirens and mermaids? We will never know for sure. Odysseus sailed on unharmed from his encounter with the sirens but they were far from the only female threat he faced on his journey home. To reach his wife Penelope, Odysseus had to outfox the witch Circe who had transformed his men into pigs and he had to flee imprisonment by the nymph Calypso who desired him for her husband. The threat from a lot of the female antagonists that Odysseus encounters is they set up rival places to dwell. The fact it takes him so long to wrench himself away from Circe, the fact he has to endure staying with Calypso all reinforces just how much that nostos, that return home, is so important. Of course Penelope is being constantly hounded by different suitors at the court so I think there's a mirroring effect there so when Odysseus is moving through his journey of course he's then got to also be assailed by these various women. One thing that scholars have said about the song of the sirens is that the language that's used and the way it's phrased in the original Greek feels much more like it's been a passage taken out of the Iliad, that in a way the sirens are actually trying to call Odysseus back into the previous poem, into being a previous sort of hero, the sort of hero of the battlefield and that part of his temptation is to go back to that form of heroism which now the Trojan War has ended, there's no place for anymore. Once a hero such as Odysseus has negotiated the trials, seen off temptations and survived it all, he is ready for one final ordeal. The object of the quest is within reach. One more challenge lies ahead. The greatest he must endure. Hungry and faint he walked on and on until at last Ivan came to the house. Twelve poles stood in a circle around it. On all but one was stuck a human head. This was the home of the Baba Yaga. You've come for my horses, said the old woman. Well, you can take one if you're fast enough. I'll give you three days to find them. Fail though and I'll put your head on a spike. Ivan had no choice. The Baba Yaga's mares, however, were just as fast as promised. They hid from Ivan in every corner of the woods. It was only with the help of friends made and lessons learned on his quest that Ivan succeeded. At the end of the three days, he left the enraged Baba Yaga on the back of a new steed. Ivan willed the magical creature on towards a reunion with the princess and a final confrontation with Koschei the Deathless. The ordeal is the greatest test of the hero. The risk of failure or even death hangs over them. Ivan survives the ordeal and is rewarded. But in other tales, the hero must slay a minotaur, journey to the underworld, or as in the Icelandic saga of the Volsungs, survive an encounter with a great and terrible dragon. The Volsunga saga dates back over a thousand years. It tells of the rise and fall of the ill-fated Volsung clan, their encounters with the gods, and their triumphs and defeats in love and battle. The Volsunga saga began as a series of separate tales that told individual high-born families of their associations with the heroic past. The earliest evidence for the saga are from the 7th and 8th century. We know these stories are being told even around the year 1000 because there are brimstones in Sweden. The culture of the states that produced Volsung saga, it's a culture of warriors, it's a culture of voyagers, it's a culture that hugely privileges male adventurousness and male willingness to take enormous risks, and therefore it produces a hero that's also very extreme. This hero was Sigurd. His father had been killed in a battle with the god Odin, so the young Sigurd was raised by a dwarf master blacksmith named Regin. Sigurd is that medieval audience could aspire to be like in terms of his humility and his wisdom. He is one of those figures that like many heroes connects the gods with the human, but he comes also to represent very importantly not only the interface between humans and the gods, but also the interface between human beings and wild nature. As he evolves he becomes more and about being a kind of wild man, what would a man be like if he wasn't ever civilized, if he wasn't ever subject to being taught and brought up and taught codes of manners. The villain facing Sigurd in the Volsung saga is a creature named Fafnir. Fafnir was the brother of the dwarf Regin, but his lust for gold corrupted him. He murdered his father and stole the family treasure. Obsessively guarding this vast trove deep in the mountains, over time he transformed into a dragon. Dragons are found in stories across the world, from ancient texts of Greece and China to the epics of Persia and later tales of Christianity, but every culture's dragon is different. The Germanic dragon seems to be particularly into treasure and I think this is an association with the quintessential idea of the good ruler. The best thing a lord can be is generous, so if you want to do a good epithet for a good lord you call him a ring giver. Obviously the dragon represents the exact opposite of that, he's keeping all the treasure for himself. Fafnir can be seen to represent the worst aspects of greed. He hoards this treasure in a way that it can't be used by anyone, it can't be put to use by a good ruler who would share it among his men and ensure that society functioned well. Sigurd is sent to kill the dragon Fafnir by his foster father Regin. Near the dragon's lair, Sigurd finds a great trench carved in the earth. For every day Fafnir is leaving his treasure and slithering down to the river to drink. Sigurd digs a hole in this trench and waits for the dragon. As Fafnir passes above Sigurd thrusts his sword up into the serpent's belly. Fafnir is defeated but it is not the treasure alone that Sigurd wins. He tastes some of the dragon's blood and as soon as the dragon's blood touches his tongue he can understand the That really just brings to the fore the way that Sigurd is destined to be a part of the wild. It enables him to live in the wild as if it were his society. The reward quickly proves useful. Birds are chattering in the trees above. Sigurd soon realizes that they're talking about him. His foster father Regin, the birds say, is plotting to betray Sigurd. His adventure is not over yet. Sigurd's story and the Folsom saga do not end with the defeat of Fafnir nor does the hero's journey. Once the object of one's quest has been achieved there is the return home and coming back can be as adventurous and as dangerous and as thrilling as setting out in the first place. Ivan and the princess raced away from Koschei. The demon however was close on their heels but Ivan would not be defeated this time. Just as Koschei was closing in Ivan swung his club high and hard. Koschei the deathless was dead. Ivan's quest was at an end. His beloved wife was safe at last. The giant's body burned on a pyre. As Koschei's ashes scattered to the winds Ivan and his princess returned on their magical steed to the castle in the woods. There they ruled in peace and happiness forevermore. Successful in returning from the special world our hero returns not only with the object of his quest but with the newfound wisdom and self-knowledge required to build a better life. A new status quo is born in the ordinary world so the hero's journey comes to an end. Several decades have passed since Campbell first outlined his theory. Storytellers from Hollywood and beyond continue to be inspired by it and it's helped shape modern thinking about the origin of myth. But Campbell is not without his critics. Scholars continue to debate the merits of his theory and there are many other lenses through which to examine mythology's roots and meaning. All these mythologies were developed by societies for a really wide variety of different purposes other than simple entertainment. They were often developed to teach people very complex moral lessons about being members of particular cultures. When we're thinking about myths we do have to look at the particular culture they've grown out of because they do tell us something about the nationalistic background or the cultural background of these particular indigenous peoples. If you look underneath and pay attention to the cultures themselves and start looking at the context in the broader world they live in they're just far more interesting. The idea of a common humanity reflected in the hero's journey remains an attractive one in an often divided world. But as this series will show the realm of myths and monsters is far too strange and fascinating for one model to contain. In the long history of humanity and in the deep recesses of our collective imaginations there are far more stories for us to explore. Stories of magic and wonder, of love and betrayal, of sacrifice and cruelty. The world we know and the great mysteries that lie beyond.